Welcome to episode seven of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. This is Jennifer Gonzalez,

and today we are talking about timed math tests.

Before we get started, I told you I would always give you a teaching tip at the beginning of each

episode. So here's my tip for you today. Always plan to end your class five minutes before the

class is supposed to end. In other words, if you're teaching a class and students are supposed to be

released at 10 a.m., have it in your head right away that they are you're going to be done at 955.

This seems kind of like a no-da tip, but for myself as a teacher, I would see 10 a.m. as the end

point and I would try to squeeze as much as I possibly could into that class. And it caused a lot

of stress. It caused a lot of rushing at the end. A lot of me sort of shouting out the last few bits

of instruction or whatever it was as students were getting up and leaving the room. And when I figured

out that I should actually mentally plan to be done at 955, things always went much, much better.

Because typically I wouldn't be done at 955. I'd be done at 956 or 57. And there would still be that

nice relaxed buffer time for everybody to pack up, people to ask last minute questions. And I

wasn't frantically trying to get everything done. So if this sounds typical to you or it sounds

familiar to you, try to have that discipline of just always saying, I am going to be done five

minutes really, not that I hope I will. But if it's 950 or 953 and you're not done yet, that's the

time to decide what to cut out because you're not going to make it. Don't try to squeeze it in.

Okay, so that's my, that is my tip of the day. Today's going to be a shorter episode. I'm going to

try it out to answer one question per episode and just focus on that topic. I think it'll make

it easier for people to find the episodes that pertain to what they're most interested in. So this

will be quicker. So here's the question that I'm going to answer today. Hi Jen, I've got a question

about elementary school math. We're using some homeschool curriculum that asks us to do timed math

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